E-commerce marketplace Snapdeal’s carefully laid out strategy has helped its turnaround in FY19.
As per regulatory documents filed by the company, its consolidated revenues grew to Rs. 925.3 crore in FY19, against Rs. 535.9 crore in FY18, an increase of nearly 73 per cent.
The e-commerce firm also managed to reduce its losses by a significant 71 per cent to Rs. 186 crore in FY19 from Rs. 611 crore reported in FY18.
In its filings, the company said:“This year we continued our focus on driving growth with a lean and capital-efficient foundation in the business. Our operating revenue increased 87 per cent on a YoY basis with a significant reduction of the cost base. The company achieved a significant milestone by achieving cash break even in the month of June 2018 and also made the highest ever net revenue in its history in the month of October 2018.”
These results are in keeping with Snapdeal’s 2.0 strategy, which it formulated in 2017.
Snapdeal had said it aspired to be an “open marketplace” which would amass a large number of sellers very quickly at minimum effort, maximise the operating efficiency of the marketplace by adopting a lean operations model and pursue growth“based on healthy unit economics.”
Snapdeal has started focusing on the needs of the value-conscious buyers in India and, hence, now more than 80 per cent of its users come from the small towns and cities of India. This market of nearly 400 million potential buyers is the fastest growing segment in India.
In the last two years, Snapdeal has added more than 60,000 new seller partners, who have added over 50 million new listings. Snapdeal now has more than 500,000 registered sellers, who have more than 200 million listings on the marketplace.
“Our transacting customers grew 2.2X and traffic surged 2.3X to 70 million unique users per month. And all this in a year when e-commerce companies in India burnt through US $ 2.5 billion in the pursuit of growth,” Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal’s co-founder and CEO, said in a blog posted on his LinkedIn account.